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Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction
This volume is a study of the interdisciplinary nature of prison escape tales and their impact on European cultural identity in the eighteenth century. Prison escape narratives are reflections of the tension between the individual’s potential happiness via freedom and the confines of the social order. Contemporary readers identified with the prisoner, who, like them suffered the injustices of an absolutist regime. The state imprisons such renegades not just out of a desire to protect the public but more importantly to protect the state itself. Hence, prison escape tales can be linked with a revolutionary tendency: when free, such former detainees equipped with a pen openly and justly challenge the status quo, hoping to inspire their readers to do the same. Escape tales have had a considerable impact on cultural identity, because they embody the interdependent relationship between literature and myth on the one hand and literature and history on the other.
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Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction
This volume is a study of the interdisciplinary nature of prison escape tales and their impact on European cultural identity in the eighteenth century. Prison escape narratives are reflections of the tension between the individual’s potential happiness via freedom and the confines of the social order. Contemporary readers identified with the prisoner, who, like them suffered the injustices of an absolutist regime. The state imprisons such renegades not just out of a desire to protect the public but more importantly to protect the state itself. Hence, prison escape tales can be linked with a revolutionary tendency: when free, such former detainees equipped with a pen openly and justly challenge the status quo, hoping to inspire their readers to do the same. Escape tales have had a considerable impact on cultural identity, because they embody the interdependent relationship between literature and myth on the one hand and literature and history on the other.
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Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction
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Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction

Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction

Overview

This volume is a study of the interdisciplinary nature of prison escape tales and their impact on European cultural identity in the eighteenth century. Prison escape narratives are reflections of the tension between the individual’s potential happiness via freedom and the confines of the social order. Contemporary readers identified with the prisoner, who, like them suffered the injustices of an absolutist regime. The state imprisons such renegades not just out of a desire to protect the public but more importantly to protect the state itself. Hence, prison escape tales can be linked with a revolutionary tendency: when free, such former detainees equipped with a pen openly and justly challenge the status quo, hoping to inspire their readers to do the same. Escape tales have had a considerable impact on cultural identity, because they embody the interdependent relationship between literature and myth on the one hand and literature and history on the other.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781611487718
Publisher: University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date: 07/20/2016
Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 168
File size: 8 MB

About the Author

Michael J. Mulryan is associate professor of French at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. His research focuses primarily on the representation of urban space and the marginalized in eighteenth-century French literature. He has published several articles on Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Jean-François Marmontel, and l’Abbé Bucquoy, which have appeared in academic journals, such as 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, andInquiries in the Early Modern Era, XVIII:New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century,Cithara: Essays in Judeo-ChristianTradition, Dalhousie French Studies, and L’Érudit Franco-Espagnol.

Denis Grélé is associate professor of French at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. His research interests are French Utopias in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He is the author of Travailleren utopie: Les Condamnés du Bonheur (1675-1789) (2009), and of numerous articles on Lesage, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Madame de la Guette, and utopia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in academic journals, such as Les Cahiersdu XVIIème siècle, L’Érudit Franco-Espagnol,Neophilologus, Seventeenth-CenturyStudies, and Studies on Voltaire and theEighteenth xCentury.

Table of Contents

A Note on Translations
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Michael J. Mulryan and Denis Grélé
OneA Model for Eighteenth-Century Récits d’évasion: Odysseus’s Flight from Polyphemus’s Cave
Michael J. Mulryan
TwoThe “Slippery Eel”: Escape Episodes and Ideological Ambiguity in Eighteenth-CenturyCriminal Biographies, The Cases of Louis-Dominique Cartouche and John Sheppard
Léa Lebourg-Leportier
ThreeHaving a Cage in Her Hand: Escaping Representations of Comtesse de La Motte-Valois
Claire Trévien
FourDu plaisir dans ma solitude: Finding Pleasure in the Prisons of Manon Lescaut
Rori Bloom
FiveUtopia as a Prison: Escaping from the Land of Happiness in Tyssot de Patot’s Les Voyages et Avantures de Jaques Massé
Denis Grélé
Conclusion
Michael J. Mulryan and Denis Grélé
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
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Literature
Literary Criticism
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18th-century literature->Criticism->General
Literature, Modern->18th century->History and criticism
Literature
Literary Criticism
General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous
Modern Literature
18th-century literature->Criticism->General
Literature, Modern->18th century->History and criticism

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